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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

ahem, by law programming languages must have code samples on the front page

Yes, after wandering through a few pages trying to find an example that actually did something, I gave up and moved on.

This was especially confusing to me when I clicked on the "try" button and was dropped into a page with an empty text box. Most playgrounds I've seen before at least have a "hello world" there. There's a run button, but it's not particularly useful with an empty file!

If this was released in April, I'd assume it was a joke: no va, no go... Not Go.

The code block after "Welcome" is the code sample. Very literate.

A caption for that sample, indicating it is one, would help.

Is it meant to do something? It doesn't follow the same cause/effect syntax as the tutorial, and plopping that welcome block into https://playground.nova-lang.net/ doesn't seem to do anything. I assume it's the note taking part of the syntax?

Its not necessarily meant to do anything on its own. The text there is the same cause/effect syntax, just with slightly different delimiters. If you were to include the fact it needs to execute for the rule to work on after the code, like: "|| - Welcome to Nova! -", then the rule would execute.

OH! Ok that makes more sense. `:` from the tutorial is `-` or `~`, because it's the first char after the pipe.

I do lose track after that though, in my brain, It looks like the entire second part after the second pipe character should be just one long fact assigned to the stack between tildes, but I think it's adding each one of the bullet-prefixed lines to it.

That is one of a couple syntactical shorthands, explained a small bit here: https://nova-lang.net/introduction-to-nova/sight/#sometime-y...

yeah, the "." is a syntax for putting multiple things on the same stack

[0] https://nova-lang.net/introduction-to-nova/sight/#sometimes-...

It's there, but yes the home page is very confusing. I lost interest very fast.

I found some example code on their github https://github.com/dan-online/Nova

This is an unrelated synonymous language. Besides this and submitted one, there're few others found online, one[0] being 20y+ old (first release 06/2003). There's also a research one on functional parallel programming[1], but no public implementation seems to exist. (Though conceptually Futhark is similar; maybe that Nova even influenced Futhark's creation.)

[0]: http://www.navgen.com/nova/index.html

[1]: https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2013-07_nova-functio...

*homonymous (a synonym is the opposite of a homonym)

Are you sure that a synonym is the opposite of a homonym, rather than say, the logical inverse corollary of a homonym? I'd think "the opposite of a homonym" would just be a word spelled differently from the target word, no?

A synonym is a different word with the same meaning. A homonym is the same word with a different meaning.

A homonym is not the same word. Homonyms include both homographs, which are still two different words with different meanings, just spelled the same way (e.g lead[verb] and lead[noun]), and homophones, which are also still two different words with different meanings, just pronounced the same way (e.g. there and their). That said, homonyms also includes word pairs that are both homographs and homophones like "bat", being the animal, the verb, and the baseball equipment (presumably among other uses).

Apparently there are sevecal conflicting definitions. The ones I’m using are:

Homograph = same spelling, different meaning

Homophone = same pronunciation, different meaning

Homonym = same spelling and pronunciation, different meaning

Seems to be one of the cases that the academic definition has been simplified in public (quite like theory/hypothesis from science) use and, consequently, adopted by dictionaries making it canonical for many. So your definition is correct from theoretical linguistics perspective but dictionaries also give the broader umbrella definition GP mentions. Ironically dictionaries may've been the reason this distinction was blurred with early lexicographers grouping homographs (logically, spelling in text not relevant) and homophones under an homonym heading.

It's also interesting checking their (Greek originating) etymologies and morphologies. Homo- from omós meaning same, -graph/-phone/-onym from gráphō/phōné/ónoma (ō becoming represented by letter ω in modern Greek) meaning writing/sound/name. And, syn-, equivalent to prefix co-, is from syn (preposition) meaning jointly/together. So respectively, literal meanings, being same writing, same sound, same name, co-named.

Hence about hom/synonym, their difference comes from "name" and "word" being distinct concepts. More specifically, in (Aristotelian) philosophy "name" was tied to essence of things, synonym being "same name, same essence" *, homonym being "same name, different essence". In time "name" and "word" were conflated. Moreover synonym evolved semantically, only retaining the "same essence" as "same meaning", and homonym retained its form. Result being one term being about "many words to same meaning" and the other about "one word to many meanings"**.

*So by ancient philosophy my choice of synonym will've been accurate! But you're right they stand opposite, both then and now.

**And then there's the homonym/polysemy distinction for specifying unrelated/related meanings, essentially reviving Aristotelean essence, and the reason why in dictionaries some words (e.g. bank, see[0]) have multiple entries each with multiple meanings.

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bank

True, thanks. Had forgot this term even existed.

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